Write a summary of the plot .

The story is about a girl, Sarah, ten years old,  who was Jewish in the Second World War. One day, her parents and her get arrested, but just before that she locks her four-year-old brother Michel in a cupboard to protect him. Sarah thinks they will be back within a few hours, and she will release him then. Only, she doesn’t get back. She is being held in  the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a stadium that was once used to hold bicycling races. The stadium was never meant to hold as many people as it does now, so the toilets and food and water supplies are no-where near good. Sarah’s worries keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes by. Later, she gets transported to Drancy, and then to Auswitsch. In Auswitsch she makes a friend, Rachel, and together they try to escape. With help of a guard that Sarah used to know, they do, but Rachel gets very ill, and Sarah needs to leave her with a family. The family helps Sarah to go home, but when she does, and opens the door of the cupboard, she finds Michels dead body.

The other story is about a woman whose name is Julia. Julia is an American reporter who lives in France. She is asked to write a report about the Vélodrome d'Hiver. When she digs into the story, she finds out that it has some connection to her. Her husband’s family namely lived in the apartment that they are going to live in, but she also finds the story of a young girl there, Sarah, who locked her brother in to keep him safe. Julia becomes obsessed with Sarah’s story and tries to find out everything that happened. Eventually, she finds out that Sarah got married, she had a baby and she died not long after that. Julia believes that Sarah didn’t accidently drive her car into a crash, but deliberately. Not long after that, Julia and her husband decide that they should get a divorce. They don’t move in in the apartment, but Julia goes back to New York, where she gets a second child, whom she calls Sarah.

Explain the title, use quotes from the novel.

Sarah’s key obviously refers to the key she uses to lock the cupboard that Michel is in. She keeps it with her all the time, wherever she goes.

“ ‘You still know me, right.’

(…) She got the key out of her pocket and showed it to him.

‘Do you remember my little brother?’

He nodded.

‘You need to let me go, monsieur. He is in Paris. Alone. See, I locked him in a cupboard, because, I thought…’”

In French and Dutch the book is called ‘Her name was Sarah’ and I think that refers to both the little girl off course, but also the fact that you know so little of her, and that you can only know so little, but at least you know her name. There are a lot of victims that we will never know the names off, but at least we do off this one.

Discuss the themes of your novel.

Holocaust: The story of Sarah takes place during the holocaust. She is Jewish, and there for a potential victim of the Germans.

Looking for the unknown: Julia is a journalist who wants to know everything about everything, so when she gets a new story, a new mystery, she definitely tries to unrelish it.

What is the setting of the story? When and where does it take place. How do you know? Can you say something about the social/cultural setting?

The story takes place in France. A part of Sarah’s story also takes place in Poland, Auswitsch. From Sarah’s point of view, you get a lot of descriptions, like ‘The ground was dirty, but not a kind of dirty she had ever seen.’ Sarah is new to a lot of things, so she describes is with great amazement.

The apartment is very important for the story, because both Sarah’s and Julia’s lives revolve around it. Sarah cannot come back to it, but she feels like she has to, and she feels like she is responsible for her brother’s death. Julia wants to go and live there, but then she also finds out that it is the scenery from the story that she is investigating.

Is the story told with flashbacks or flash forwards, or is the story chronological throughout?

The story is told with both flashbacks and flash forwards. Because Julia looks for Sarah’s story. So throughout Julia’s story, you read Sarah’s. But within both stories a chronological order is used. You first find out how the two people live now, and towards the end you see how they evolved and deal with a lot of very difficult situations.

Describe the main characters. How do they develop in the story; why do they say/do what they say/do, what is the relevance of their actions to the story?

Sarah Starzynski: Sarah is a Jewish girl who gets arrested during World War Two for being Jewish. She locks her brother in a cupboard to protect him, but fails to get him out alive. I think that her childish believe in that she can still save him saves herself, because it is that drive that helps her escape the concentration camp. Sarah grows up too quick, because she gets separated from her family, and she feels responsible for the little children around her. After the war, another family turns out to live in her old apartment. She grows old ‘a broken woman’ and never really recovers from the horrors that she has seen.